Judith "Judy" C. Brown is an American physicist and professor emerita at Wellesley College.^[1] She was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the Machine Listening Group for over 20 years, and is recognized for her contributions in music information retrieval, including developing the constant-Q transform.^[2][3] She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and has served on the ASA technical committees for musical acoustics and animal bioacoustics.^[1]

Brown was born in Teague, Texas and attended Rice University for her bachelor's degree in chemistry.^[4] She attended the University of California, Berkeley for her PhD and then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow in solid state physics at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay.^[2] She then joined the faculty in the physics department at Wellesley College, where she taught the first quantum mechanics course at Wellesley.^[1] She joined the MIT Media Lab as a visiting scientist in 1986 to conduct research on computer perception of music and developed classification algorithms for marine mammal sounds.^[2] She was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1999 for her contributions in applying signal processing to musical acoustics, frequency tracking, instrument identification, and spectral analysis.^[5] She retired in 2005.^[1]